[lbo-talk] Query re Marx Quote

Angelus Novus fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 7 13:35:56 PDT 2012


Ken, I don't know offhand the quote you're seeking from the 1844 Manuscripts, but there is a similar statement from Marx in Capital, which refutes the myth of absolute immiseration that bourgeois critics of Marx often promote:

"Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker [...] All means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become a means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment, they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process [...], they transform his life into working-time, and his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital. But all methods of the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation, and every extension of accumulation becomes, conversely, a means for the development of these methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse."



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